C# makes it easy to create large graphs of objects connected by their fields. The larger this graph grows, the more complex it is to deal with objects in the graph. It’s hard to look at code or set a breakpoint in a debugger and get an intuitive sense of all these connections. So today we’ll write a small tool to visualize an object graph!
Job-Safe APIs in Unity 2018.3
Unity 2018.3 brings us even more thread-safe APIs that we can call from the C# job system. Today we’ll look at a systematic way to find them all so we know what’s safe to use and what’s not.
IL2CPP Output for C# 7.3: Everything Else
Today we conclude the series by looking at all the remaining features in C# 7.3 that we get access to in Unity 2018.3. Read on to learn about new kinds of structs, in parameters, new where constraints, discards, default literals, generalized async returns, and new preprocessor symbols!
IL2CPP Output for C# 7.3: Local functions, fixed, and stackalloc
Continuing the series, today we’ll dive into local functions, fixed-size buffers, fixed blocks on arbitrary types with GetPinnableReference, and stackalloc initializers to see how they’re all implemented in C++ and what assembly code ends up actually running on the CPU.
IL2CPP Output for C# 7.3: ref Return Values and Local Variables
Today we continue the series by looking at a pair of powerful, related features in C# 7.3: ref return values and local variables. These enable some great optimizations, so let’s look at the IL2CPP output for them to make sure it’s as good as it looks.
IL2CPP Output for C# 7.3: Pattern Matching
Last week we started exploring the new features of C# 7.3 in Unity 2018.3 by delving into tuples. This week we’ll continue and look at pattern matching. Read on to see how the many forms of pattern matching are actually implemented by IL2CPP!
IL2CPP Output for C# 7.3: Tuples
Unity 2018.3 officially launched last Thursday and with it comes support for the very latest version of C#: 7.3. This includes four new versions—7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3—so it’s a big upgrade from the C# 6 that we’ve had since 2018.1. Today we’ll begin an article series to learn what happens when we use some of the new features with IL2CPP. We’ll look at the C++ it outputs and even what the C++ compiles to so we know what the CPU will end up executing. Specifically, we’ll focus on the new tuples feature and talk about creating, naming, deconstructing, and comparing them.
Handling Internal Errors
Some errors can be handled and some cannot. Nevertheless, it’s extremely common to see codebases chock-full of ineffective error handling for these unrecoverable issues. The result is a lot of extra code to write, maintain, and test that often serves to make debugging harder. Today’s article shows you how to make debugging internal errors so much easier by effectively writing code to handle them.
Supporting ParallelFor Jobs in Ranged Native Collections
Native collections are funny things. On one hand they’re structs, which are supposed to be value types that get copied on assignment. On the other hand, they act like reference types because they contain a hidden pointer internally. This can make using and implementing them difficult to understand, especially in the context of a ParallelFor job. Today we’ll examine more closely how to properly support ParallelFor jobs, especially with ranged containers like NativeList<T>.
NativeChunkedList<T>: Part 2
Last week we looked at a new native collection type: NativeChunkedList<T>. This type saved us a lot of memory and gave us a faster way to dynamically grow an array. Unfortunately, iterating over it was quite a lot slower. Today we’ll speed it up for both IJob and IJobParallelFor. In doing so, we’ll learn more about how to create custom Unity job types and about how IEnumerable and IEnumerator work.